Faith First published Wed Jun 23, 2010; substantive revision Fri Aug 20, 2010

What is faith? This entry focusses on the nature of faith, although issues about the

justifiability of faith are also implicated.

The concept of faith is a broad one: at its most general ‘faith’ means much the same as

‘trust’. This entry is specifically concerned, however, with the notion

of religious faith—or, rather (and the difference is important), the kind of faith

exemplified in religious faith. Philosophical accounts are almost exclusively

about theistic religious faith—faith in God—and they generally, though not exclusively,

deal with faith as understood within the Christian branch of the Abrahamic traditions.

But, although the theistic religious context settles what kind of faith is of interest, the

question arises whether faith of that same general kind also belongs to other, non-

theistic, religious contexts, or to contexts not usually thought of as religious at all. It

may perhaps be apt to speak of the faith of—for example—a humanist, or even an

atheist, using the same general sense of ‘faith’ as applies to the theist case.

Philosophical reflection on theistic religious faith has produced different accounts or

models of its nature. This entry suggests that there are three key components that may

feature, with varying emphases, in models of faith—namely the affective,

the cognitive and the volitional. Several different principles according to which models

of faith may be categorized are noted, including

how the model relates faith as a state to faith as an act or activity;

whether it takes its object to be exclusively propositional or not;

the type of epistemology with which the model is associated—‘evidentialist’ or

‘fideist’;

whether the model is necessarily restricted to theistic religious faith, or may

extend beyond it.

There is, of course, no ‘established’ terminology for different models of faith. A brief

initial characterisation of the principal models of faith and their nomenclature as they

feature in this discussion may nevertheless be helpful—they are:

the ‘purely affective’ model: faith as a feeling of existential confidence

the ‘special knowledge’ model: faith as knowledge of specific truths, revealed by

God

the ‘belief’ model: faith as belief that God exists

the ‘trust’ model: faith as belief in (trust in) God

the ‘doxastic venture’ model: faith as practical commitment beyond the evidence

to one's belief that God exists

the ‘sub-doxastic venture’ model: faith as practical commitment without belief

the ‘hope’ model: faith as hoping—or acting in the hope that—the God who

saves exists.

The entry proceeds dialectically, with later sections presupposing the earlier discussion.

1. Models of faith and their key components

2. The affective component of faith

3. Faith as knowledge

4. Faith and reason: the epistemology of faith

5. Faith as belief

6. Faith as trust

7. Faith as doxastic venture

8. Faith as sub-doxastic venture

9. Faith as hope

10. Faith as a virtue

11. Faith beyond (orthodox) theism

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1. Models of faith and their key components An initial broad distinction is between thinking of faith as a state and thinking of it

as an act, action or activity. Faith may be a state one is in, or comes to be in; it may also

essentially involve something one does. An adequate account of faith, perhaps, needs to

encompass both. Certainly, Christians understand faith both as a gift of God and also as

requiring a human response of assent and trust, so that people's faith is something with

respect to which they are both receptive and active.

There is, however, some tension in understanding faith as both a gift to be received and

a venture to be willed and enacted. A philosophical account of what faith is may be

expected to illuminate this apparent paradox. One principle for classifying models of

faith is according to the extent to which they recognise an active component in faith

itself, and the way they identify that active component and its relation to faith's other

components. It is helpful to consider the components of faith (variously recognised and

emphasised in different models of faith) as falling into three broad categories:

the affective, the cognitive and the volitional. (There are also evaluative components in

faith—but these may appear as implicated in the affective and/or the cognitive

components, according to one's preferred meta-theory of value.)

2. The affective component of faith One component of faith is a certain kind of affective psychological state—namely, a

state of feeling confident and trusting. Some philosophers hold that faith is to be

identified simply with such a state: see, for example, Clegg (1979, 229) who suggests

that this may have been Wittgenstein's understanding. Faith in this sense—as one's

overall ‘default’ attitude on life—provides a valuable foundation for flourishing: its loss

is recognised as the psychic calamity of ‘losing one's faith’. But if foundational

existential confidence is to feature in a model of religious theistic faith, more needs to

be added about the kind of confidence involved. Theistic faith is essentially faith in

God—and, in general, faith of the kind exemplified by theistic faith must have

some intentional object. It may thus be argued that an adequate model of faith cannot

reduce to something purely affective: some broadly cognitive component is also

required.

3. Faith as knowledge What kind of cognitive component belongs to faith, then? One model identifies faith

as knowledgeof specific truths, revealed by God. Such a model has received prominent

recent defence in the work of Alvin Plantinga, who proposes an epistemology in the

tradition of the reformers, principally John Calvin. Calvin defines faith thus: ‘a firm and

certain knowledge of God's benevolence towards us, founded upon the truth of the

freely given promise in Christ, both revealed to our minds and sealed upon our hearts

through the Holy Spirit’ (John Calvin, Institutes III, ii, 7, 551, quoted by Plantinga

(2000, 244)).

Appeal to a special cognitive faculty

‘Reformed’ epistemologists have appealed to an externalist epistemology in order to

maintain that theistic belief may be justified even though its truth is no more

than basically evident to the believer—that is, this truth is not rationally inferable from

other, more basic, beliefs, but is found to be immediately evident in the believer's

experience (see Plantinga and Wolterstorff 1983, Alston 1991, Plantinga 2000). On

Plantinga's version, theistic beliefs count as knowledge because they are produced by

the operation of a special cognitive faculty whose functional design fits it for the

purpose of generating true beliefs about God. Plantinga calls this the sensus divinitatis,

using—or perhaps adapting (Helm 1998)—a term of Calvin's. This quasi-perceptual

faculty meets functional criteria as a mechanism that confers ‘warrant’ and (granted

theism's truth) yields knowledge because God designs it just for that purpose. In

defence of specifically Christian belief, Plantinga argues that the same warrant-

conferring status belongs to the operation of the Holy Spirit in making the great truths

of the Gospel directly known to the believer.

The welcome certainty of faith

This appeal to a God-given ‘higher’ cognitive faculty is found (in the early 12th

Century) in al-Ghazâlî's Deliverance from Error, where it provides the key to the ‘Sufi’

resolution of his religious crisis and his sceptical doubts about the deliverances of sense

perception and unassisted human reason. Faith is thus understood as a kind of

knowledge attended by a certainty that excludes doubt. But faith will not be exclusively

cognitive, if, as in Calvin's definition, faith-knowledge is not only ‘revealed to our

minds’ but also ‘sealed upon our hearts’. For, on this model faith will also have an

affective component that includes a welcoming of the knowledge received.

Volitional aspects of faith on the‘special knowledge’ model

This model of faith as special knowledge, certain and welcome, exhibits faith as

essentially something to be received. Nevertheless, the model may acknowledge a

volitional component, since an active response is required for reception of the divine

gift. Such a volitional component is implied by the real possibility that faith may be

resisted: indeed, it may be held that in our sinful state we will inevitably offer a

resistance to faith that may be overcome only by God's grace. It is, however, a further

step for persons of faith to put their revealed knowledge into practice by trusting their

lives to God and seeking to obey his will. On this ‘special knowledge’ model of faith,

however, this activity counts as ‘acting out’ one's faith rather than as part of faith itself.

Persons of faith thus act ‘in’, ‘through’ or ‘by’ faith: but their faith itself is the revealed

knowledge on which they act.

4. Faith and reason: the epistemology of faith Faith seems to involve some kind of venture, even if talk of a ‘leap of faith’ may not be

wholly apt. It is thus widely held that faith goes beyond what is ordinarily reasonable,

in the sense that it involves accepting what cannot be established as true through the

proper exercise of our naturally endowed human cognitive faculties—and this may be

held to be an essential feature of faith. As Kant famously reports, in the Preface to the

Second Edition of his Critique of Pure Reason: ‘I have … found it necessary to

deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith’ (Kant 1787/1933, 29). As well,

however, theist philosophers typically desire to show that faith is not ‘contrary to

reason’. On models of faith that take a cognitive component as central, and construe

faith's object as propositional, reasonable faith arguably needs to conform

to evidentialism—the requirement, generally thought essential to rationality, to hold

propositions to be true only to the extent justified on one's available evidence. Faith's

venturesomeness is thus in tension with its reasonableness, and models of faith differ in

the way they negotiate this tension by taking a particular stance on ‘faith and reason’.

Another classificatory principle, then, is in terms of the type of epistemology of faith

each particular model generates.

The epistemology of the ‘special knowledge’ model

The ‘special knowledge’ model of faith generates an epistemology under which,

although ordinary cognitive faculties and sources of evidence do not yield certain

knowledge of theistic truths, there is a ‘higher’ cognitive faculty that neatly makes up

the deficit. This model seems thus to secure the rationality of faith: if faith consists in

beliefs that have the status of knowledge, surely faith cannot fail to be rational? And,

once the deliverances of the special cognitive faculty are included amongst the

believer's basic experiential evidence, the evidential requirement on reasonable belief is

surely satisfied? These considerations may aspire to win the high ground in the ‘faith

and reason’ debate for the ‘special knowledge’ model—but it is not clear that this

aspiration can finally be met.

Reflective faith and the question of entitlement

From the perspective of reflective persons of faith (or would-be faith), the question

of entitlementarises: are they rationally, epistemically—even, morally—entitled to

adopt or continue in their faith? This question will be existentially important, since faith

will not count as of the religious kind unless commitment to it makes a significant

difference to how one lives one's life. Reflective believers who are aware of the many

options for faith, and the possibility of misguided and even harmful faith-commitments,

will wish to be satisfied that they are justified in their faith. The theistic religious

traditions hold a deep fear of idolatry—of giving one's ‘ultimate concern’ (Tillich

1957/2001) to an object unworthy of it. So the desire to be assured of entitlement to

faith is not merely externally imposed by commitment to philosophical critical values: it

is a demand internal to the integrity of theistic faith itself. Arguably, believers must

even take seriously the possibility that the God they have been worshipping is not, after

all, the true God (Johnston 2009). But, for this concern to be met, there will need to be

conditions sufficient for justified faith that are ‘internalist’—that is, conditions whose

obtaining is, at least indirectly if not directly, accessible to believers themselves. Those

conditions may plausibly be presumed to include the evidentialist requirement that faith

is justified only if the truth of its cognitive content is adequately supported by the

available evidence.

The ‘knowledge’ model as leaving the question of entitlement unanswered

It may be argued, however, that, if the ‘special knowledge’ model is correct, those who

accept evidentialism will be unable to satisfy themselves of their entitlement to their

faith. Theistic truths may be directly revealed, and experienced as certainly and

immediately evident, yet, on reflection, one may doubt whether such experiences are

genuinely revelatory since competing interpretations seem at least possible. It may be

true, as Plantinga's Reformed epistemology emphasises, that ifGod exists such

experiences meet externalist criteria for knowledge, even though the truth of the beliefs

concerned remains open to reflective ‘internalist’ doubt. On an externalist account, that

is, one might lack independent evidence sufficient to confirm that one has knowledge

that God existswhile in fact possessing that very knowledge. And one might thus refute

an objector who claims that without adequate evidence one cannot genuinely know. But

this is still, it may be argued, insufficient to secure entitlement to theistic faith—

assuming that entitlement requires that one has evidence adequate to establish one's

knowledge, or even just one's justified belief, that God exists. For, one has such

evidence only conditionally on God's existence—but it is precisely entitlement to

believe that God exists that is at issue (Kenny 1992, 71; Bishop and Aijaz 2004).

5. Faith as belief If faith is not ‘a firm and certain knowledge’ of theistic truths, then a model of faith as

having a propositional object may be retained by identifying faith with a certain kind

of belief. The relevant kind will be belief with theological content—that God exists, is

benevolent towards us, has a plan of salvation, etc.—where this belief is also held with

sufficient firmness and conviction. Richard Swinburne labels this the ‘Thomist view’ of

faith, and expresses it thus: ‘The person of religious faith is the person who has the

theoretical conviction that there is a God.’ (Swinburne 2005, 138). (Aquinas's own

understanding of faith is more complex than this formulation suggests, however, as will

be noted shortly.)

The rationality of faith on this model will rest on the rationality of the firmly held

theological beliefs in which it consists. As Swinburne notes, if such beliefs are founded

on evidence that renders their truth sufficiently more probable than not, then the beliefs

concerned may amount to knowledge on a contemporary ‘justified true belief’ fallibilist

epistemology, even though they fall short of knowledge on Aquinas's own criteria,

which require that what is known be ‘seen’ (i.e., fully and directly comprehended)

(Summa Theologiae 2a2ae 1, 4 & 5 (O'Brien 1974, 27)). But, in any case, if success

attends the extended natural theological project to which Swinburne has notably

contributed, the reasonableness of faith on this model will straightforwardly be

vindicated.

Some argue, however, that the truth of theism is ‘evidentially ambiguous’—that is, that

our total available evidence is equally viably interpreted from both a theist and a

naturalist/atheist perspective (Hick 1966 and 1989; Davis 1978; Penelhum 1995;

McKim 2001). This thesis of evidential ambiguity may be supported as the best

explanation of the diversity of belief on religious matters, and/or of the persistence of

the debate about theism, with philosophers of equal acumen and integrity engaged on

either side. Or the ambiguity may be considered systematic—for example, on the

grounds that both natural theological and natural atheological arguments fail because

they are deeply circular, resting on implicit assumptions acceptable only to those

already thinking within the relevant perspective. (In relation to Swinburne's Bayesian

natural theology, in particular, this objection surfaces in criticism of assumptions about

how to set the prior probabilities implicated in calculations of, for example, theism's

probability on the evidence of the ‘fine-tuning’ of the Universe's basic physical

constants, or of the probability, on all our evidence, of the truth of the Resurrection.) If

the ambiguity thesis is correct, then—assuming evidentialism—firmly held theistic

belief will fail to be reasonable.

On this model of faith as belief, all that characterises faith apart from its theological

content is the firmness or conviction with which faith-propositions are held true. Firm

belief in the truth of a scientific proposition, for example, will fail to count as

faith only through lacking the right kind of content. This model therefore shares with

the ‘special knowledge’ model in taking its theological content as essential to what

makes theistic faith faith, and so rejects the suggestion that faith of the same sort as

found in the theistic religious traditions might also be found elsewhere.

Furthermore, in taking faith to consist in belief that theological propositions are true,

this model invites the assumption that theological convictions belong in the same

category of factual claims as scientific theoretical hypotheses with which they

accordingly compete. That assumption will lead those who think that theological claims

are not reasonably accepted on the evidence to regard faith as worthless and

intellectually dishonourable—at best, ‘a degenerating research programme’ (Lakatos

1970). (On this negative assessment of faith's evidential support, persons of faith come

perilously close to the schoolboy's definition mentioned by William James: ‘Faith is

when you believe something that you know ain't true’ (James 1896/1956, 29). Or, if

believers readily abandon theological explanations whenever competing scientific ones

succeed, their God gets reduced to ‘the God of the gaps’.) These misgivings about the

model of faith as firmly held factual theological belief dissolve, of course, if the

‘Swinburnean’ extended natural theological project succeeds. Those who suspect that

this success will not be forthcoming, however, may look towards a model of faith that

exhibits its cognitive content as playing some other role than that of a high-level

scientific explanatory hypothesis.

Aquinas's account of faith

Though firmly held theological belief is central to it, Aquinas's understanding of faith is

more complicated and nuanced than the view that faith is ‘the theoretical conviction that

God exists’. Aquinas holds that faith is ‘midway between knowledge and opinion’

(Summa Theologiae 2a2ae 1, 2 (O'Brien 1974, 11)). Faith resembles knowledge,

Aquinas thinks, in so far as faith carries conviction. But that conviction is not well

described as ‘theoretical’, if that description suggests that faith has

a solely propositional object. For Aquinas, faith denotes the believer's fundamental

orientation towards the divine. So ‘from the perspective of the reality believed in’,

Aquinas says, ‘the object of faith is something non-composite’ (non-propositional)—

namely God himself. Nevertheless, grasping the truth of propositions is essential to

faith, because ‘from the perspective of the one believing … the object of faith is

something composite in the form of a proposition’ (Summa Theologiae, 2a2ae, 1, 2

(O'Brien 1974, 11 & 13), my emphases).

A further problem with describing as Thomist a model of faith simply as firm belief in

theological propositions is that Aquinas takes as central an act of ‘inner assent’ (Summa

Theologiae, 2a2ae, 2, 1 (O'Brien 1974, 59–65)). This is problematic because, (i) in its

dominant technical usage belief is taken to be a mental (intentional) state—a

propositional attitude, namely, the attitude towards the relevant proposition that it is

true; (ii) belief in this sense is widely agreed not to be under volitional control—not

directly, anyway; yet (iii) Aquinas holds that the assent given in faith is under the

control of the will. Aquinas need not, however, be construed as accepting ‘believing at

will’, provided we allow that inner assent may be an act without being an intentional

action. Assent may be construed as something that has to be elicited yet terminates a

process that is subject to the will—a process of inquiry, deliberation or pondering that

does involve mental actions, or, in the case of faith, a process of divine grace that may

be blocked by the will.

Most importantly, however, Aquinas says that assent is given to the propositional

articles of faithbecause their truth is revealed by God, and on the authority of the

putative source of this revelation. Terence Penelhum puts it like this: ‘Thomas tells us

that although what one assents to in faith includes many items not ostensibly about God

himself, one assents to them, in faith, because they are revealed by God … It is because

they come from him and because they lead to him that the will disposes the intellect to

accept them’ (Penelhum 1989, 122: see Summa Theologiae, 2a2ae, 1, 1 & 2 (O'Brien

1974, 5–15)). So Aquinas's model of faith is of believing (assenting to) propositional

truth-claims on the basis of authoritative divine testimony. This is the same model

found in John Locke: ‘Faith … is the assent to any proposition … upon the credit of the

proposer, as coming from God, in some extraordinary way of communication’ (Locke

1698/1924, 355; compare also Alston 1996, 15).

The unanswered question of entitlement—again

Faith as assent to truths on the basis of an authoritative source of divine revelation is

possible, though, only for those who already believe that God exists and is revealed

through the relevant sources. Might such faith, then, have to rest on a prior faith—faith

that God exists and that this is his messenger or vehicle of communication? Those

foundational claims, it might be maintained, are held true on the grounds of adequately

supporting evidence, such as successful arguments of natural theology and/or evidence

for miraculous endorsement of a prophet's authority. Faith might then have a purely

rational foundation. But this could hardly be so for every person of faith, since not

everyone who believes will have access to the relevant evidence or be able to assess it

properly. Besides, although Aquinas allows that rational assessment of the available

evidence may lead a person to faith, he does not think that such an assessment could

ever elicit assent itself—only demonstration can achieve that (see O'Brien, 1974,

footnote 2b, 58–9). Aquinas's view is thus thatall believers stand in need of God's

grace: ‘the assent of faith, which is its principal act … has as its cause God, moving us

inwardly through grace’ ((Summa Theologiae, 2a2ae 6, 1 (O'Brien 1974, 167)). It

follows, then, that believing that God exists and is revealed in specific ways is itself a

matter of faith, and not a purely rationally establishable prolegomenon to it.

Aquinas's model of faith thus shares with the ‘special knowledge’ model the problem

that it leaves unanswered the reflective believer's concern about entitlement. Attempting

to settle that concern by meeting the evidential requirement leads to circularity:

believers are to accept theological truths on divine authority, yet the truth that there

is such an authority (historically mediated as the relevant tradition maintains) is

amongst those very truths that are to be accepted on divine authority—indeed, it is the

crucial one. As Descartes puts it in the Dedication to his Meditations, ‘although it is

absolutely true that we must believe there is a God, because we are so taught in the

Holy Scriptures, and, on the other hand, that we must believe the Holy Scriptures

because they come from God …, we nevertheless could not place this argument before

infidels, who might accuse us of reasoning in a circle’ (Haldane and Ross 1967, 133).

Aquinas and Calvin: faith as accepting theological propositions as divinely revealed

The fact that Aquinas's model shares this epistemic limitation with Calvin's is no

accident: both understand faith as (or as essentially involving) the grasping of

propositionally expressible truths as divinely revealed through willingly receiving God's

gracious gift of that very revelation. Both Aquinas and Calvin take firm belief to be

essential to faith, though they differ in whether or not to count it as knowledge. Calvin

takes the vehicle of revelation to be a special cognitive faculty, whereas Aquinas takes

it to be the tradition, as transmitted through the Church. And the grace that is needed for

assent works, for Aquinas, not through a special quasi-perceptual cognitive mechanism,

but by enabling the will to avoid blocking assent to the revealed truth. Plantinga's work

has effectively displayed what these two Christian thinkers have in common, and he

thus aptly names his own model of faith the ‘A/C model’ (Plantinga 2000, 168–86). His

appeal to externalist epistemology supplies something needed for a philosophical

defence of faith understood in this way, although arguably not all that is required, if it is

fair to press the question of entitlement that appears to remain unanswered.

Revelation—and its philosophical critique

The justifiability of belief that God exists is typically the focal issue in the Philosophy

of Religion. Yet the theistic traditions always include a foundational claim about an

authoritative source, or sources, of revealed truth. Religious theism is not just believing

that God exists; it is believing that God exists and is revealed thus and so (in great

historical acts, in prophets, in scriptures, in wisdom handed down, etc.). The

reasonableness of theism is therefore as much a matter of the reasonableness of an

epistemology of revelation as it is of a metaphysics of perfect being. The question of

how God may be expected to make himself known has gained prominence through

recent discussion of the argument for atheism from ‘divine hiddenness’ (Schellenberg

1993; Howard-Snyder and Moser 2002). That argument assumes that a loving God

would make his existence clear—but this assumption is open to question. Perhaps God

provides only, as it were, ‘secret’ evidence of his existence, purposely overturning the

expectations of our ‘cognitive idolatry’ in order to transform our egocentric self-

reliance (Moser 2008); besides, there may be significant constraints logically inherent

in the very possibility of unambiguous divine revelation to finite minds (King 2008).

Similarly, accounts of theistic faith will be open to critique when they make

assumptions about the mechanisms of revelation. In particular, the model of faith as

assent to propositions as revealed holds that, since God's grace is required for that

assent, when grace is effective the whole ‘package deal’ of propositional revealed truth

is accepted. This yields the notion of ‘the Faith’, as the body of theological truths to be

accepted by ‘the faithful’, and it becomes a sign of resistance to divine grace to ‘pick

and choose’ only some truths, as heretics do (Greek: hairesis, choice) (see Summa

Theologiae 2a2ae 5, 3 (O'Brien 1974, 157–61). For heresy to be judged, however, some

human authority must assume it possesses the full doctrinal revelation, with God's grace

operating without resistance in its own case. Whether that assumption can ever be

sufficiently well founded to justify condemning others is an important question, whose

neglect may be seriously harmful, as we are reminded by the fact that the phrase for ‘act

of faith’ in Portuguese—auto-da-fé—came to mean the public burning of a heretic.

But the deeper assumption made by this model of faith as belief (as, too, by the ‘special

knowledge’ model) is that God's self-revelation is primarily the revelation of the truth

of propositions articulated in human language (compare Swinburne 1992). Alternative

understandings of revelation are available, however. In particular, it may be held that it

is primarily the divine presence itself that is revealed—the reality, not merely a

representation of it. Propositional articulations of what is revealed may still be essential,

but they need to be accepted as at a remove from the object of revelation itself, and

therefore as limited. The process of arriving at propositional articulations expressing the

nature and will of the self-revealing God—the doctrines of ‘the Faith’—will, of course,

be understood as a process under providential grace. It is often assumed, however, that

that process can achieve ‘closure’ in a completed set of infallible credal beliefs. But this

assumption about how divine inspiration operates may be contested, both on the

theological grounds that it reflects the all-too-human desire to gain control over God's

self-revelation (to ‘pin God down once and for all’), and on the wider epistemological

grounds that any attempt to grasp independent reality in human language will be in

principle fallible and subject to revision in the light of future experience.

6. Faith as trust Not all models of faith are primarily propositional, however. Theistic faith may seem

better expressed as believing in God, rather than as believing that God exists—for

example, the Christian creeds begin ‘Credo in unum Deum …’—and it is arguable that

‘belief in’ is neither merely an idiomatic variant on, nor reducible to, ‘belief that’ (Price

1965). It may thus be held that faith as accepting propositional truths as divinely

revealed rests on believing in God—and it is this ‘believing in’ which is,

fundamentally, the nature of faith.

What more is there to believing in God beyond believing that God exists, on this non-

reductive view?. To believe in God is to make a practical commitment—the kind

involved in trusting God, or,trusting in God. (The root meaning of the Greek pistis,

‘faith’, is ‘trust’.) This, then, is a model of faith as trust—but of trust not simply in the

sense of an affective state of confidence, but in the sense of an action. On

this fiducial model of faith, the volitional component of faith takes central place, with

the cognitive component entailed by it. The fiducial model is widely identified as

Protestant. Swinburne, for example, calls it the ‘Lutheran’ model, and defines it thus:

‘the person of faith does not merely believe that there is a God (and believe certain

propositions about him)—he trusts Him and commits himself to Him’ (2005, 142). Yet,

as noted earlier, Aquinas takes the ultimate object of faith to be God, ‘the first reality’,

and, furthermore, understands ‘formed’ faith as trusting commitment to God, motivated

by, and directed towards, love of God as one's true end (seeSumma Theologiae 2a2ae, 4,

3; O'Brien 1974, 123–7). It is true that Aquinas attributes faith to the devils—but this

‘faith’ amounts only to their belief that what the Church teaches is the truth, arrived at

not by grace but ‘forced from them’ reluctantly by ‘the acumen of their natural

intelligence’ (Summa Theologiae 2a2ae, 5, 2; O'Brien 1974, 155 & 157). So Aquinas's

account of ‘saving’ faith is also a fiducial model.

The venture of trust

If faith is a kind of trust, then we may expect our understanding of faith to profit from

an analysis of trust. Conceptually fundamental to trust is the notion of a person (or

persons)—the truster—trustingin some agent or agency—the trustee—for some

(assumedly) favourable outcome (though what the trustee is trusted for is often only

implicit in the context). As noted at the outset, there is a usage of ‘faith’ for which

‘having/placing faith in’ is (near enough) synonymous with ‘trusting’ or ‘trusting in’.

But this usage, of course, omits whatever is distinctive about the kind of trusting that is

involved in faith of the theistic sort. Nevertheless, it is worth considering what follows

about theistic faith from holding it to be a kind of trust.

Trust involves a venture; so too—it is widely agreed—does faith. So, if faith is trust, the

venture of faith might be presumed to be the type of venture implicated in trust. A

venture is an action that places the agent and outcomes of concern to the agent

significantly beyond the agent's own control.Trust implies venture. When we trust we

commit ourselves to another's control, accepting—and, when necessary, co-operating as

‘patient’—with the decisions of the trustee. Venturing in trust is usually assumed to

be essentially risky, making oneself vulnerable to adverse outcomes or betrayal.

(Swinburne makes the point this way: ‘To trust someone is to act on the assumption that

she will do for you what she knows that you want or need, when the evidence gives

some reason for supposing that she may not and where there will be bad consequences

if the assumption is false’ (2005, 143). Annette Baier puts it somewhat differently,

taking trust to involve ‘accepted vulnerability to another's possible but not expected ill

will (or lack of good will) toward one’ (Baier 1986, 234).) Accordingly, it seems

sensible to hold that one should trust only with good reason. But if, as is plausible, good

reason to trust requires sufficient evidence of the trustee's trustworthiness, reasonable

trust appears both to have its venturesomeness diminished and, at the same time, to

become more difficult to achieve than we normally suppose. For we often lack

adequate—or even, any—evidence of a trustee's trustworthiness in advance of our

venture, yet in many such cases we suppose that our trust is entirely reasonable. But, if

adequate evidence of trustworthiness is notrequired for reasonable trust, how is

reasonable trust different from ‘blind’ trust?

This problem might be avoided by arguing that the question of when one may rationally

trust another may be resolved by a decision theoretic calculation, factoring in the extent

to which one's evidence supports the potential trustee's trustworthiness and the utilities

or disutilities of the possible outcomes. It may thus on occasion be practically rational

to trust a person whose likelihood of trustworthiness is low, if a sufficiently valuable

outcome may be achieved only by so doing. (An unlikely rescuer may rationally be

trusted if the only one available.) But this approach misses something important in

social intercourse, where we generally count it a virtue to be ready to trust others

decisively without such prior calculation. Such openness may still be broadly rational,

however, given our long shared experience that willingness to trust others usually does

elicit trustworthy behaviour: accordingly, though I may have little or no direct evidence

that this particular fellow citizen of mine will prove trustworthy if I turn to her in a

sudden predicament, I may have good evidence for the general reliability of others in

my community.

Nevertheless, it can sometimes be reasonable to act decisively on the assumption that

people will be worthy of trust in quite particular respects without having evidence for

their trustworthiness sufficient to justify such decisiveness (see, for example, Adams

1987). And this seems to be because, in such cases, (i) what has to be decided is all or

nothing—whether to trust or not—so that tentatively taking the trustee to be trustworthy

only to the partial degree supported by one's evidence is just not a separate option; and

(ii) at the point where the decision has to be made it is impossiblethat there should be

evidence that justifies more than modest partial belief—impossible that evidence should

justify decisively taking the trustee to be trustworthy. Such cases provide a particularly

interesting class of exceptions to the general evidentialist requirement to take a

proposition to be true only as justified by one's evidence. They are interesting because

they do not involve non-epistemic considerations overriding epistemic ones, as is the

case with some readily recognisable types of exception to trust-evidentialism—for

example, cases where being in an established relationship with someone obliges one to

trust contrary to the weight of one's evidence; or cases of ‘educative’ or ‘therapeutic’

trust, where others are trusted in order to develop or restore their trustworthiness. In the

target cases, the epistemic concern to grasp truth and avoid falsehood isnot overridden:

they are cases where the truth that a person is trustworthy may be beneficially grasped

only if one first takes it that the person is trustworthy beyond the possible support of

evidence—though once the venture is made conclusive evidence of trustworthiness may

happily soon accumulate.

7. Faith as doxastic venture On a model that takes religious faith to consist in an act of trust, the analogy with the

venture of interpersonal trust is suggestive. Yet there are significant differences. For

one thing, venturing in trust does not carry risk if God really is the trustee. ‘A mother's

tender care may cease toward the child she bare: she may be forgetful, yet

will I remember thee, for mine is an unchanging love,’ as—more or less—the hymn has

the Lord declare. Rather, the venture involved in trusting in God (if such there be)

seems doxastic: the one who trusts ventures in believing that God exists and may be

relied on for salvation. A model of theistic faith as trust thus appears to have, at its

foundation, faith as doxastic venture: trusting in God seems to presuppose trusting

that God exists. But, then, of course, the question whether, and under what conditions,

one may be entitled to such a venture becomes pressing.

Theological non-realism

One way to relieve this pressure is to offer a non-realist analysis of theological claims.

Trusting God will then not entail any commitment to reality's being a certain way.

Rather, on the non-realist view, theological claims arise because living ‘trustingly’

comes to be expressed and reinforced through a culturally constructed fiction (about

God and his great saving acts). That existential confidence may then be described, using

the language of the fiction, as ‘trusting God’ (Cupitt 1980, Geering 1994). On such a

non-realist account, the model of faith as trust brackets the cognitive component of

faith—and becomes, in effect, a model of faith as purely a certain kind of affective

state. But, as noted earlier, those who take faith to have a genuinely cognitive

component (a grasping—or would-be grasping—of how things really are) could not be

satisfied with such a reductive model.

Defending doxastic venture by analogy with interpersonal trust?

It might be suggested that entitlement to theistic doxastic venture may still be defended

by analogy with the propriety of decisively trusting another beyond one's evidence.

Reflecting on that suggestion discloses further points of disanalogy, however. In cases

of interpersonal trust a venture is often needed in initially taking the trustee to be

trustworthy, but evidence will inevitably later emerge which will either confirm or

disconfirm the truth of that claim—and trust may, and rationally should, be withdrawn

if the news is bad. Furthermore, interpersonal trust does not requireactually

believing that the trustee is worthy of trust, only that one decisively takes this to be true

(i.e., acts on the assumption of its truth) when one comes to act. People of theistic faith,

however, typically do believe that God exists and may be trusted for salvation, and, if—

as we are here assuming—acting on this belief ventures beyond evidential support, then

it is a venture that persists and is not confined to initial commitment only.

Psychologically, no doubt, continuing to journey in theistic faith may reinforce one's

commitment—but the reinforcing experiences (which often involve faith renewed in the

face of apparent failures of divine love) do not have the status of evidence

that independently confirms the initial venture.

Doxastic venture without doxastic voluntarism

Many dismiss the idea that one may venture in believing that God exists as committing

a category error: ventures are voluntary, but propositional belief is not directly under

voluntary control. Trusting God, however, entails practical commitment to the truth of

theological faith-propositions (though the converse entailment fails)—and commitment

to the truth of a proposition in one's practical reasoning is under direct voluntary

control.

It is one thing to be in the mental state of holding that p is true; it is another to take p to

be true in one's practical reasoning (although these typically go together, since to hold

that p is true is to be disposed to take p to be true in practical reasoning when the

question whether p becomes salient). Practical commitment to a faith-proposition

therefore could be a venture: there is no misguided ‘doxastic voluntarism’ in allowing

this possibility. Doxastic venture is thus not a matter of willing oneself to believe

without adequate evidential support; rather it is a matter of taking an already heldbelief

to be true in one's practical reasoning while recognising that its truth lacks such support.

The psychological possibility of doxastic venture

Some philosophers have argued, however, that one cannot (in full reflective awareness,

anyway) believe that p while accepting that one has insufficient evidence for p's truth

(Adler 2002). The counterclaim that this is possible is defended by William James, in

his controversial 1896 lecture, ‘The Will to Believe’ (James 1896/1956). James agrees

that belief must be evoked—one cannot simply believe at will (he later came to regret

his lecture's title). But he observes that many beliefs have causes that do not constitute

an evidential grounding of their truth: James labels these causes ‘passional’—again, a

potentially misleading term, since it includes much more than emotional causes of

belief. In particular, beliefs may be caused by ‘the circumpressure of one's caste or set’,

of which one's inherited religious tradition is a paradigm case (James 1896/1956, 9).

James is thus able to explain the psychological possibility of doxastic venture: one

already has a ‘passionally’ caused belief, which one then takes to be true in practical

reasoning while recognising its lack of adequate evidential grounding (compare Creel

1994, who takes ‘faith’ to connote a ‘non-evidential doxastic passion’). A doxastic

venture model of theistic faith thus reconciles faith as gift with faith as an action: the

action is taking a faith-proposition to be true in practical reasoning; the gift provides the

motivational resources for so doing, namely a firm belief in the truth of the faith-

proposition, despite its recognised lack of adequate evidential grounding.

Examples of doxastic venture models: Kierkegaard and Tillich

On the doxastic venture model, faith involves full commitment, in the face of the

recognition that this is not ‘objectively’ justified on the evidence.

Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postcriptdefinition of faith as ‘an objective

uncertainty held fast in an appropriation process of the most passionate inwardness’

(Kierkegaard 1846/1968, 180) is an example of a doxastic venture model. So too is Paul

Tillich's account of faith as ‘the state of being ultimately concerned’, since the claim of

the object of one's ultimate concern to ‘promise total fulfilment even if all other claims

have to be subjected to it or rejected in its name’ cannot in principle be established on

the basis of the evidence. (Tillich, 1957/2001, 1 and 21).

Doxastic venture model contrasted with evidential proportion models: the status of

Aquinas's model

The doxastic venture model contrasts with what Paul Helm has called evidential

proportion models of faith (Helm 2000, 21). Calvin's model and Plantinga's A/C model

count as evidential proportion models, once it is allowed that believers' evidence

includes what is immediately evident in their experience through the operation of

divinely ordained mechanisms of revelation. (Plantinga originally expressed his defence

of properly basic theistic belief in terms of the rationality of believing in God ‘without

any evidence or argument at all’ (Plantinga 1983, 17). But in fact Plantinga endorses the

evidentialist requirement on rational theistic belief—his point is just that this

requirement may be fully met through what is basically, non-inferentially, evident in the

believer's experience. Hence Plantinga's insistence that his Reformed epistemology is

not fideistic (Plantinga 2000, 263).)

Aquinas's model of faith, though widely thought of as an evidential proportion model,

may arguably be better classified as a doxastic venture model, since, as already noted in

Section 5, Aquinas holds that the available evidence, though it supports the truth of

foundational faith-propositions, does not provide what Aquinas counts as sufficient (i.e.

demonstrative) support to justify inner assent (in addition to references to the Summa

Theologiae given previously, see 2a2ae. 2, 1 (O'Brien 1974, 63); and compare also

Penelhum 1989, 120). Now, whether practical commitment to the truth of a given faith-

proposition does or does not venture beyond adequate evidential support will be relative

to assumptions about (a) where the level of evidential support required for ‘adequacy’

should be set, and (b) just how firm and decisive propositional faith-commitment needs

to be. On some such assumptions, for example those made by Bayesians, the support

provided by the evidence Aquinas adduces—or, by a suitable contemporary upgrading

of that evidence—may be considered enough to make reasonable a sufficiently high

degree of belief (or credence) in theistic faith-propositions—albeit a credence less than

1—so that there is no venturing beyond the support of the evidence. Interpreting

Aquinas's model of faith as an evidential proportion model may thus be viable.

Nevertheless, Aquinas's own assumptions on these matters may leave him closer to

Kierkegaard and Tillich than is commonly thought (consider Summa Theologiae 2a2ae

4, 1 and, once again, 2a2ae 6, 1 (O'Brien 1974, 117–9 & 167)).

The special role of faith-propositions

It may be argued (again, by Bayesians, for example) that once practical commitment to

the truth of propositions is recognised as a matter of degree, there are no possible

circumstances where ‘the evidence does not decide’, and so no occasion for faith as

doxastic venture. But if the domain of faith is, as C.Stephen Evans puts it, ‘the

assumptions, convictions and attitudes which the believerbrings to the evidence for and

against religious truth’ (Evans 1985, 178), and faith's cognitive component offers a

‘total interpretation’ of the world of our experience (Hick 1966, 154), then

(foundational) faith-propositions function as ‘highest-order framing principles’

which necessarilycannot have their truth settled by appeal to the force of a body of

independent evidence (Bishop 2007a, 139–44). Taking such a faith-proposition to be

true, then, is not something that comes in degrees: either one ‘buys into’ the overall

worldview a (foundational) faith-proposition proposes, or one does not. Such a choice is

existentially important, and settling it raises anxiety about exercising a responsibility

that cannot—without ‘bad faith’—be transferred onto the relatively impersonal function

of one's reason, since a venture beyond any rational certification is required. The

doxastic venture model may thus be regarded as capturing the spiritual challenge of

faith more satisfactorily than evidential proportion models do, since it involves a deeper

surrender of self-reliant control, not only in trusting God, but in accepting that there is a

God—indeed, this God—who is to be trusted.

Doxastic venture models of faith and epistemic concern

Doxastic venture in favour of faith-propositions can be justifiable, of course, only if

there are legitimate exceptions to the evidentialist requirement to take a proposition to

be true just to the extent of its evidential support—and only if the legitimate exceptions

include the kind of case involved in religious, theistic, faith-commitment.

A possible view of theistic faith-commitment is that it is wholly independent of the

epistemic concern that cares about evidential support: faith then reveals its authenticity

most clearly when it takes faith-propositions to be true contrary to the weight of the

evidence. This view is widely described as ‘fideist’, but ought more fairly to be

called arational fideism, or, where commitment contrary to the evidence is positively

favoured, irrational or counter-rational fideism. Despite its popular attribution both to

the church father Tertullian and to ‘the father of existentialism’, Kierkegaard, counter-

rational fideism does not seem to have been espoused by any significant theistic

philosophers (passages in Tertullian and Kierkegaard that appear to endorse this

position may be interpreted as emphasising that Christian faith requires accepting, not

logical contradiction, but ‘contradiction’ of our ‘natural’ expectations, wholly

overturned in the revelation that the power of divine love is triumphant in the Crucified

One).

Serious philosophical defence of a doxastic venture model of faith amounts to a supra-

rationalfideism, for which epistemic concern is not overridden and for which, therefore,

it is a constraint on faith-commitment that it not accept what is known, or justifiably

believed on the evidence, to be false. Rather, faith commits itself only beyond, and not

against, the evidence—and it does so out ofepistemic concern to grasp truth on matters

of vital existential importance. The thought that one may be entitled to commit to an

existentially momentous truth-claim in principle undecidable on the evidence when

forced to decide either to do so or not is what motivates William James's ‘justification

of faith’ in ‘The Will to Believe’ (James 1896/1956). If such faith can be justified, its

cognitive content will (on realist assumptions) have to cohere with our best evidence-

based theories about the real world. Faith may extend our scientific grasp of the real,

but may not counter it. Whether the desire to grasp more truth about the real than

science can supply is a noble aspiration or a dangerous delusion is at the heart of the

debate about entitlement to faith on this supra-rational fideist doxastic venture model.

A fuller discussion of the debate between the moderate, Jamesian, fideist and the

evidentialist is beyond this entry's scope. Still, it is worth remarking that those who

think that faith as doxastic venture can be justified face the challenge of providing the

tools for weeding out distorted and unjustifiable forms of faith. On the other side, those

who reject doxastic venture as impermissible have to consider whether taking a stance

on the nature of reality beyond anything science can even in principle confirm may not,

in the end, be unavoidable, and potentially implicated in the commitments required for

science itself (see Bishop 2007a, Chapters 8 and 9).

8. Faith as sub-doxastic venture Some accounts allow that faith involves practical commitment venturing beyond

evidential support, yet do not require (or, even, permit) that the venturer actually

believes the faith-proposition assumed to be true. This variant may be called the ‘sub-

doxastic venture’ model of faith. F.R.Tennant holds a view of this kind: he takes faith to

be the adoption of a line of conduct not warranted by present facts, that involves

experimenting with the possible or ideal, venturing into the unknown and taking the risk

of disappointment and defeat. Faith is not an attempt to will something into existence

but rather treating hoped for and unseen things as if they were real and then acting

accordingly (Tennant 1943/1989 p.104). Swinburne refers to this as the ‘pragmatist’

model (Swinburne 2005, 147–8; Swinburne 2001, 211; compare Golding 1990, 2003;

Buckareff 2005; and Schellenberg 2005).

William Alston (1996) suggests that faith may involve ‘acceptance’ rather than belief; a

sub-doxastic venture model then results if (as Jonathan Cohen holds) to accept that p is

‘to have or adopt a policy of deeming, positing, or postulating that p—i.e. of including

that proposition … among one's premisses for deciding what to do or think in a

particular context, whether or not one feels it to be true that p’ (Cohen 1992, 4). The

firmness of faith-commitment is then just the firmness of one's ‘resolve to use [faith-

claims] as a basis for one's thought, attitude and behaviour’ (Alston 1996, 17): there is

no firm assurance of their truth. Decisive commitment in the absence of such assurance

may nevertheless be possible, motivated (as Swinburne suggested in the first edition of

his Faith and Reason) by the evaluative belief that ‘unless [faith-propositions are true],

that which is most worthwhile is not to be had’ (Swinburne, 1981, 117). This is a

religiously austere model of faith, with God's grace playing a more limited role than

usually supposed.

9. Faith as hope

Some philosophers have suggested that the epistemological challenges faced by

accounts of faith as involving belief beyond the evidence may be avoided by construing

theistic commitment as hope. Theistic hope seems not to be mere tenacity (‘clinging to

one's hopes’) (Taylor 1961), but a more complex attitude. James Muyskens suggests,

for example, that one who hopes ‘keep[s] his life open or fluid with respect to [a faith-

proposition] p—where (a) neither p nor not-p is certain for him, (b) he wants p and (c)

he sees p as constructively connected with his own well-being and/or concept of himself

as a person’ (1979, 35). Muyskens contrasts hope with faith (understood as belief),

arguing that a religion of hope is both epistemically and religiously superior to a

religion of faith. But faith is not generally thought of as competing with hope (Creel

1993); indeed, other philosophers identifyfaith with hoping that the claims of faith are

true (Pojman 1986; 2003). Hope as such is an attitude rather than an active

commitment: a model of faith as hope may thus, more strictly, take faith to beacting in,

or from, hope. It then comes close to a sub-doxastic venture model of faith, differing

only in so far as acting from hope that God exists differs from taking this claim to be

true (albeit without belief) in one's practical reasoning—and this difference may be

undetectable at the level of behavioural outcomes. A model of faith as acting in hope

also shares with the sub-doxastic venture model in leaving out the affective certitude

that is widely thought to characterise faith (Tennant 1943/1989, 112).

10. Faith as a virtue Faith is traditionally regarded as one of the ‘theological’ virtues. If a virtue is a

‘disposition of character which instantiates or promotes responsiveness to one or more

basic goods’, then theistic faith qualifies since it is ‘a responsiveness to practical hope

and truth’, provided theistic faith-claims are indeed true (Chappell 1996, 27). Faith will

not, however, be a virtue as such, if it is accepted that faith can be misplaced or, even,

‘demonic’, directed upon a ‘false ultimate’ (Tillich 1957/2001, 21). To be virtuous,

faith must be faith in a worthy object: it is faith in God that is the theological virtue.

More generally, faith is virtuous only when it is faith to which one is entitled. An

account of the conditions under which faith is permissible is thus the key to an ethics of

faith.

On models of faith as a (special) kind of knowledge, or as firmly held belief, it may

seem puzzling how faith could be a virtue—unless some implicit volitional component

emerges when such models are further explicated, or, alternatively, a case can be made

for the claim that what is involuntary may nevertheless be praiseworthy, with theistic

faith as a case in point (Adams 1987). Furthermore, as already suggested (Sections 4 &

5 above), models of faith as knowledge or belief fail to provide non-circular conditions

sufficient for entitlement, unless the truth of faith-propositions is established by

independent argument and evidence. Purely fiducial, evidential proportion, models of

faith make it easy enough to see how faith may be praiseworthy—though they will

stand in need of a defence that the God who is trusted is indeed the true God. Doxastic

(and sub-doxastic) venture models of faith need entitlement conditions, to ensure that

not just any ‘leap of faith’ is permissible—the Jamesian account already mentioned

(Section 7) aims to meet this need. Arguably, James's own view of what suffices to

justify a faith-venture needs an ethical supplement: both the non-evidential motivation

for the venture and its content must be morally acceptable (Bishop 2007a, 163–6).

Faith is only one of the theological virtues, of course, the others being hope and charity

(or love,agape): and St Paul famously affirms that the greatest of these is love (I

Corinthians 13). The question thus arises how these three virtues are related. One

suggestion is that faith is taking it to be true that there are grounds for the hope that love

is supreme—not simply in the sense that love constitutes the ideal of the supreme good,

but in the sense that living in accordance with this ideal constitutes an ultimate

salvation, fulfilment or consummation that is, in reality, victorious over all that may

undermine it (in a word, over evil). The supremacy of love is linked to the supremacy of

the divine itself, since love is the essential nature of the divine. What is hoped for, and

what faith assures us is properly hoped for, is a sharing in the divine itself, loving as

God loves (see Brian Davies on Aquinas, 2002). On this understanding, reducing faith

to a kind of hope (Section 9 above) would eradicate an important relation between the

two—namely that people of faith take reality to be such that their hope (for salvation,

the triumph of the good) is well founded, and not merely an attractive fantasy or

inspiring ideal.

11. Faith beyond (orthodox) theism What is the potential scope of faith? On some models, the kind of faith exemplified by

theistic faith is found only there. On both the ‘special knowledge’ and the ‘belief’

models, faith is intrinsically linked to theological content—indeed

to orthodox theological content, specifiable as one unified set of doctrines conveyed to

receptive human minds by the operation of divine grace. Both the doxastic and sub-

doxastic venture models, however, allow for the possibility that authentic faith may be

variously realised, and be directed upon different, and mutually incompatible,

intentional objects. This is an important feature of accounts of faith in the American

pragmatist tradition. John Dewey strongly rejected the notion of faith as a special kind

of knowledge (Dewey 1934, 20), as did William James—and James's model of faith

rests on a permissibility thesis, under which varied and conflicting faith-commitments

may equally have a place in the ‘intellectual republic’ (James 1896/1956, 30).

Both Dewey and James defend models of faith with a view to advancing the idea that

authentic religious faith may be found outside what is generally supposed to be

theological orthodoxy. Furthermore, they suggest that ‘un-orthodox’ faith may

be more authentic than ‘orthodox’ faith. ‘The faith that is religious’, says Dewey, ‘[I

should describe as] the unification of the self through allegiance to inclusive ideal ends,

which imagination presents to us and to which the human will responds as worthy of

controlling our desires and choices’ (1934, 33). And James: ‘Religion says essentially

two things: First, she says that the best things are the more eternal things, the

overlapping things, the things in the universe that throw the last stone, so to speak, and

say the final word…. [and] the second affirmation of religion is that we are better off

now if we believe her first affirmation to be true’ (James 1896/1956, 25–6). Both

Dewey and James seek to naturalise (or, better, de-supernaturalise) theistic religion,

and, while some of what they say appears non-realist, they do in fact preserve the idea

that religious faith aspires to grasp, beyond the evidence, vital truth about the real

world. Indeed, Dewey agrees that religious belief grounds hope: it involves taking

something to be true about the real world ‘which carr[ies] one through periods of

darkness and despair to such an extent that they lose their usual depressive character’

(1934, 14–5).

A general—i.e., non-theologically specific—account of faith may have potential as a

tool for criticising philosophical formulations of the content of religious faith. The

conditions for permissible faith-venture may exclude faith in God under certain

inadequate conceptions of who or what God is—and arguably the ‘omniGod’ of much

contemporary philosophy of religion is just such an inadequate conception (Bishop

2007b). An understanding of what faith is, then, may motivate radical explorations into

the concept of God as held in the theistic traditions (Bishop 1998; Johnston 2009).

Can there be faith without adherence to any theistic tradition? Those who agree with

F.R.Tennant that ‘faith is an outcome of the inborn propensity to self-conservation and

self-betterment which is a part of human nature, and is no more a miraculously

superadded endowment than is sensation or understanding’ (1943/1989, 111) will

accept that this must be a possibility. Tennant himself suggests that ‘much of the belief

which underlies knowledge … is the outcome of faith which ventures beyond the

apprehension and treatment of data to supposition, imagination and creation of ideal

objects, and justifies its audacity and irrationality (in accounting them to be also real) by

practical actualization’ (1943/1989, 100). Faith in this sense, however, may not seem

quite on a par with faith of the religious kind. True, scientists must act as if their ‘ideal

objects’ are real in putting their theories to the empirical test; but they will ‘account

them to be also real’ only when these tests do provide confirmation.

If faith is understood as commitment beyond independent objective certification to the

truth of some overall interpretation of experience and reality, then all who commit

themselves to such aWeltanschauung will be people of faith. Faith of this kind may be

religious, and it may be religious without being theistic, of course, as in classical

Buddhism. But there may also be non-religious faith: in particular, ‘scientific’ atheists

may be making a faith-venture when they take there to be no more to reality than is in

principle discoverable by the natural sciences. The suggestion that atheism rests on a

faith-venture will, however, be strongly resisted by those who maintain ‘the

presumption of atheism’ (Flew, 1976).

An atheist's faith-venture may, however, seem oddly so described because it provides

no basis for practical hope or trust. Providing such a basis may plausibly be thought

necessary for faith—in which case, understanding faith purely as a cognitive venture is

too austere, and needs supplementing with some requirement that the truth to which the

venturer commits must be existentially important. (Note, however, that such a

supplement is implied in James's requirement that doxastic venture is permissible only

for resolving a ‘genuine option’, where a genuine option has inter alia to be

‘momentous’—existentially significant and pressing (James 1896/1956, 3–4).) Some

hold that the truth accepted by faith must be a ‘saving’ truth—a solution to a deep

problem about the human situation. Their view is thus that faith must be religious, and

they accordingly enter into argument as to which religion offers the best solution to the

human problem (see, for example, Yandell 1990, 1999). It is arguable, however, that an

existentially vital faith that grounds hope can belong within a wholly secular context.

Annette Baier suggests that ‘the secular equivalent of faith in God, which we need in

morality as well as in science or knowledge acquisition, is faith in the human

community and its evolving procedures—in the prospects for many-handed cognitive

ambitions and moral hopes’ (Baier 1980, 133). More broadly, some maintain that a

meaningful spirituality is consistent with a non-religious atheist naturalism, and include

something akin to faith as essential to spirituality. For example, Robert Solomon takes

spirituality to mean ‘the grand and thoughtful passions of life’, and holds that ‘a life

lived in accordance with those passions’ entails choosing to see the world as ‘benign

and life [as] meaningful’, with the tragic not to be denied but accepted (Solomon 2002,

6 & 51).

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Related Entries Aquinas, Saint Thomas | belief | Christian theology, philosophy and | fideism | James,

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Acknowledgments

The author thanks Sophie Milne for research assistance on this entry, and Imran Aijaz,

Thomas Harvey, Katherine Munn and Glen Pettigrove for helpful comments on drafts.